Tag: failedstate

Economics Nobel

should go to Ryan Petersen for unclogging the port of LA:

A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to

  • Understand what happened
  • Make sure everyone knows it happened
  • Understand how and why it happened
  • Understand how we might cause it to happen again
  • Update our models and actions
  • Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization

That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial benefits and no defenders and scrapping it, certainly not within a day. If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 2021. That initial tweet got 16k retweets and 33k likes, and even the others got 1000s of likes as well, so this successfully got many people’s attention. It’s worth paying attention to the details here, as this was crafted in order to spread and be persuasive, and also crafted to make people angry or to blame anyone. It’s a call to positive action. In particular, I notice these characteristics:

  1. Starts with a relatable physical story of a boat ride, and a friendly tone.
  2. Tells a (mostly manufactured) story that implies (without saying anything false) how the ride led him to figure these things out, which gives rhetorical cover to everyone else for not knowing about or talking about the problem. We can all decide to pretend this was discovered today.
  3. Then he invokes social consensus by saying that ‘everyone agrees‘ that the bottleneck is yard space. Which is true, as far as I can tell, everyone did agree on that. Which of course implies that everyone also knows there is a bottleneck, and that the port is backed up, and why this is happening. The hidden question of why no one is doing much about this is deflected by starting off pretending (to pretend?) that the boat ride uncovered the problem.
  4. Describes a clear physical problem that everyone can understand, in simple terms that everyone can understand but that doesn’t talk down to anyone. He makes this look easy. It is not easy, it is hard.
  5. Makes clear that the problem will only get worse on its own, not better, for reasons that are easy to understand.
  6. Makes clear the scope of the problem. The port of Los Angeles effectively shuts down, we can’t ship stuff, potential global economic collapse. Not clear that it would be anything like that bad, but it could be.
  7. Gives a decision principle that’s simple, a good slogan and again can be understood by everyone, and that doesn’t have any obvious objections: Overwhelm the bottleneck.
  8. Gives a shovel-ready solution on how to begin to overwhelm the bottleneck, at 0 cost, by allowing containers to stack more.
  9. Gives more shovel-ready solutions on top of that, so that (A) someone might go and do some of those as well, (B) someone can do the first easy thing and look like it’s some sort of compromise because they didn’t do the other things, (C) encourage others to come up with more ideas and have a conversation and actually physically think about the problem and (D) make it clear the focus is on finding solutions and solving problems, and not on which monkey gets the credit banana.
  10. Makes it clear solutions are non-rivalrous. We can do all of them, and should, but also do any one of them now.
  11. Gives a sense of urgency, and also a promise of things getting better right away. Not only can you act today, Sir, you are blameworthy tomorrow if you do not act, and you will see results and rewards tomorrow if you do act. Not only reactions to the announcements, physical results on the ground. That’s powerful stuff.
  12. Ends by noting that leadership is what is missing. You could be leadership and demonstrate you’re a good leader, or you can not do that and demonstrate the opposite. Whoever solves this is the leader.

All of it is due to zoning. Zoning kills.
2021-11-05: Things are better, but far from resolved, and of course the story is more nuanced than it first appeared:

it seems clear that Ryan noticeably improved the situation, but the situation is far from solved. Solving it will be a long term process, and we’ll be playing bottleneck tennis as solving one problem highlights others and makes them worse. There’s still lots of low-hanging fruit on the logistics front, starting with Ryan’s change only being implemented in Long Beach and not Los Angeles. There’s also signs of other solutions starting to come online, and that could be helped along in terms of making it shovel-ready and finding the right physical solutions.

2022-02-15: This profile makes the case that things are much more complicated, and Ryan doesn’t understand things as well as he should. Or perhaps they’re just jealous that Flexport has a much nicer UI:

For most everyone else in the logistics business, it was exasperating. “When Ryan Petersen does his interviews, people in the industry typically get upset because he tends to simplify things a lot. He appears sometimes uninformed”. Container stacking had limited impact. Petersen’s bolder proposals, such as the creation of a government-sponsored railhead depot, remain untouched. “There isn’t a silver bullet for this.”

2022-10-06: Flexport also stepped up for Masks in a huge way

When the pandemic hit and we saw there are not enough masks in our hospitals, I found that to be totally unacceptable at a civilization level. We owe this to our first responders, to our doctors. If you asked me to go in there without a mask with some weird disease that might kill me and that no one knows anything about, to serve these patients, I don’t know if I could. These are real heroes that were willing to do it. If you don’t have masks and the doctors don’t show up for work, civilization collapses pretty soon after that. That was very unacceptable to me. I rallied a team at Flexport and we stepped up.

A big part of why there were not enough masks is because all the world’s airplanes were grounded during the pandemic. They were not really flying to China. 50% of the world’s air freight flies in the belly of passenger planes. If those passenger planes are grounded, there is no air freight capacity. We found there were lots of masks available in China. They have ramped up production, but we don’t have air freight to get them in. The rest of the world, as far as I can tell, looked at that problem, put their hands up, and said, “Eh, fuck. I guess our doctors are going to suffer. Let’s watch this on TV and see what the people are saying.”

If you listen to the problem statement, 50% of the world’s plane flies in the belly of passenger planes and those are grounded right now. The solution is so obvious. Look at all the planes that are grounded. I managed through investor networks and connections that I have been fortunate enough to build over the years. I called the airline CEOs and I was like, “Hey, can we use your planes? We are going to go get some masks to save America’s hospitals.” One hundred percent of them said yes. United Airlines gave us free flights. Atlas Airlines gave us a 747 for free. We were getting Dreamliners for a 200k round trip. Ask your super-rich friends if that is a good deal on a private plane, a round trip to China on a Dreamliner. We flew 83 planes, completely full. We filled the overhead bins and the seats. In the end, we shipped 500m masks to America’s hospitals.

It was like, “Wait a minute. Why are we the ones doing that? We’re not supposed to be in that industry.” The value in that lesson for the whole world is naïve optimism. Try it. Let’s see if we can solve the problem. You can do more than you think you can. It was very inspiring for everybody at Flexport to see, “Whoa, this is working. We actually made this happen.”

Moloch

Dominic Cummings on the Sisyphean struggle of getting things done quickly within a government bureaucracy:

Various media organizations have been leaked an email from me, sent at the height of the covid disaster last year, regarding getting cash urgently to Our World in Data. Tellingly, a ‘Whitehall source’ says this is ‘so damaging’ for Cummings because he ‘is just being very blatant that due process, and procedures, are being thrown out the window’. I do not regard it as ‘damaging’ that I tried to throw ‘due process’ out the window. Sticking with ‘due process’ was killing people. I was right to send this email, I sent many other similar messages on PPE, testing, the Vaccine Task Force (see below), and my interventions saved lives / reduced suffering / speeded vital projects like vaccines. I think that if I had NOT acted like this, it would been unprofessional and unethical.

2022-03-06:

Operation Warp Speed was perhaps the most successful government program in more than 50 years but it was funded only because the Trump administration and then the Biden administration finagled the rules, almost certainly breaking some laws in the process. But that is sometimes the only way to get things done today, especially at speed.

No Financial System

As much as 50% of all unemployment monies, or $400b might have been stolen. Unemployment fraud is now offered as a service, much like ransomware. States without fraud-detection services are targeted the most.

This may be scare mongering by interested parties like the id “theft” cottage industry, but seems directionally correct. Terrible identity and financial infrastructure has consequences.

Absurdist France

perhaps the extreme bureaucracy nonsense of the french will finally catch up with them?

With the announcement of the third Paris lockdown last month to try to control the spread of Covid-19, an apotheosis of the absurd was reached.

A dense, 2-page version of the notorious “attestation,” a government form to be completed anytime one leaves home, was so convoluted that it tied the Interior Minister’s spokeswoman in verbal knots trying to explain it. The document had metastasized with each lockdown into an ever more ungainly monster.

Which of 15 boxes to check? That you planned to walk 1 kilometer with your dog, the maximum allowed, or up to 10 kilometers with your children? Would you be allowed 11 kilometers if you took the kids and the pet? What if Fido wanted to walk 10 kilometers and little Mathilde none?

Libertarians in a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had barely taken hold in the United States when principled libertarianism was reported to be among the early fatalities. “There are no libertarians in a pandemic,” Atlantic writer Derek Thompson quipped on Twitter on March 3. But that doesn’t mean libertarians haven’t made valuable contributions to the discourse surrounding COVID.

Paul Romer argued early on that government investment in massively expanded testing would be a bargain compared to the costs of letting the pandemic rage unabated. And this is one subsidy that many libertarian public voices eagerly endorsed. Yet the government is doing worse than nothing about these tests. Not only has the government neglected to subsidize them, it has put up obstacles so citizens can’t pay for them. Regulations are actively denying individuals access to valuable information about their own bodies that would help them avoid unknowingly spreading the disease.

More than 800 regulations were waived in response to COVID. While some of these will eventually come back into force, the pandemic has revealed how we’re better off without them.

Is there anything specifically libertarian about different dosing strategies? Not inherently. But the ideas owe much of their currency to the advocacy of George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok, and the debate centers on whether the bureaucratic decision-making processes of the FDA are adequate for responding to the current crisis. FDA procedures are designed for drug development and the certainty provided by time-consuming randomized control trials. As with early advice on masks and current restrictions on at-home testing, these standards may not serve us well in a rapidly progressing pandemic.

Doctor Do-Little

Fauci’s gambit — which was to play a shrewd inside game to preserve an illusion, from the outside, that science and facts were safe from political contamination — had the effect of delegitimizing science and precluding the possibility of a political solution. By fudging the facts to assuage the president and moving the goalposts to manipulate the public, Fauci, however inadvertently, helped to undermine public trust in the medical response, creating openings for conspiracy and demagoguery to fill the gap. Meanwhile, by lending legitimacy to the White House’s approach, he forestalled a political showdown — one that could have seriously altered the course of the past year.

Better Masks

We need the CDC and the FDA to step up and provide simple, clear, actionable, and specific information that would allow the public to know which masks are reliable and where they can get them, as well as how to upgrade and better wear their existing options.

instead of sitting on their hands running out the clock on vaccine approvals (astrazeneca is still not approved), some mask guidance would be good. instead, everyone at these agencies seems to be playing virtue signaling games to impress their coworkers.

Insurrection

But they did get inside. The cops seemed to divide into segments that were genuinely overwhelmed and unable to hold the line, and segments that just let the invaders in—either because they were fellow-travelers, or because they were more like Mall Cops unused to mass action literally at the doors of the building, and who just couldn’t quite believe what was happening. (In the footage these ones often look genuinely confused.) While it matters a great deal for their culpability in the long run, in terms of immediate events their motives are irrelevant. Once the doors were opened to the insurrectionists, things moved quickly. One group of goobers found themselves wandering in to the atrium and, much like the cops, seemed almost unable to believe they were inside. Initially they even stayed in between the velvet guide-ropes. Another group, or category, of entrants—like the Shaman guy and his ilk—were off and streaming and lulzing as fast as they could. And a third group—like the Ziptie guys and the woman who was eventually shot—were really and truly prepped and making a beeline for where they thought people they wanted to capture and harm would be. The violence that happened seems to have been mixed between this third group and the goobers. The latter ended up in a sort of Forward Panic, barreling along reactively, chasing anyone who ran away, descending on journalists to harass, and so on.

As the chambers were being evacuated, Trump was on the phone with Tuberville. Most likely, the President wasn’t grasping the enormity of what was actually happening. There seems to have been a period of general confusion and near panic as resistance to activating the National Guard continued. I assume we’ll learn more about that in detail soon, both how those conditions were created and who ended up authorizing their deployment. Again, while extremely important in itself, this is less relevant here. Given that the Senators and Representatives ended up being successfully secured, very quickly there wasn’t really anyone official for the Ziptie contingent to harm. Meanwhile, the regular MAGAs also had little to do. And so they degenerated into small clumps of invaders, wandered about vandalizing stuff, shitting on the floor, and accidentally tasering themselves to death while trying to steal things.